PR Prose: The AI revolution and selfishness: What it means for PR

Posted April 11, 2018By Dr. Shannon Bowen, professor in the public relations sequenceReprinted with permission from PRWeek

Artificial Intelligence will revolutionize the world and the role of humans in it
even more than the industrial revolution did. AI will also transform human consciousness
more than any movement since the Enlightenment, and arguably will go much further.
The main problem that plagues society is one that has prevailed since time began:
selfishness.

AI is progressing at a tremendous rate and it is being implemented faster than we
humans can comprehend or cope with the consequences. AI developers rush to implement
their algorithms with blinding speed because they fear being undermined by competition
or losing a competitive edge if they take the time to conduct comprehensive testing
before deployment. Innovation and competitiveness are not evil concepts because they
lead to the creation of some of the greatest accomplishments of humankind. However,
the rush to implement and test in the field without considering the consequences is
selfish. And who takes the blame when an AI system fails?

I won’t go into the well-known details, but in light of selfishness, consider the
death of the Arizona pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, when an autonomous Uber car struck
her. The most troubling aspect of the video revealed that the car did not attempt
to swerve to miss the woman — and she was a large, moving person walking a bicycle
across the street in an open an uncrowded area.

Why did the AI not swerve into the empty lane to attempt to avoid the collision? Was
this an AI algorithm failure? Driverless cars are fitted with a system of cameras,
radar, and Lidar sensors that detect traffic, pedestrians, and other objects, day
or night. Here is where the problem of selfishness is evident. A human driver would
have, most likely, swerved, even into oncoming traffic, to avoid hitting a pedestrian.
A human driver would’ve mowed down a hedge, jumped the curb, or even collided with
a tree to avoid running over a woman and her bicycle. Yet, the Uber car, never slowed
down or veered, but, plowed along, eerily, straight forward, even after impact.

AI is a learning collection of algorithms, but it has no sense of ethics or moral
choice without that being programmed into its calculations. In other words, the autonomous
driver is only as good as its programmer. AI agents do not have the judgment ability
of a human in exigencies and unexpected situations. A simplified version, with algorithmic
math removed, of the Uber incident may have looked like:

The Uber vehicle arguably did what was simplest for itself rather than what was best
for the pedestrian. Was this an AI programming code failure, or strictly conceived,
a programming code success? The revealing of this selfishness flaw in the AI is why
Uber quickly suspended the use of autonomous drive mode for further study.

The public relations problem for Uber is not only one of reputation and public confidence.
It has now also become a problem of disrespect for publics by revealing that we are
all guinea pigs in Uber’s AI test. And the test wasn’t conceived with regard to ethics.

The curtain has been opened and the wizard revealed. The AI’s flaw of selfishness
is now on display for everyone to see. And more importantly, in public relations terms,
the selfishness and hubris of Uber’s management is on display for all to see.

Any time an AI agent is programmed with self-awareness, self-preservation, or a survival
mode, it will act selfishly. Selfishness becomes mathematically predictable. This
problem is what moral philosophers have been trying to rule out ever since moral philosophy
began. Not only is selfishness a problem in human nature, the Uber incident reveals
that it is a problem in machine programming, as well. Ethics argues that the root
of almost every unethical decision begins with selfishness. Selfishness is the bias
that warps the playing field. Selfishness corrupts all ethical behavior.

As more companies become involved in AI and PR professionals are expected to use AI
data, advise on its use, develop policy around it, advise the CEO and clients on it,
and comment publicly on it, we should examine AI’s implications. How can we de-program
selfishness from AI? And how can we get our management and clients to see the potential
problems posed by selfishness? And how can we ensure that all variables should be
equally weighed by logic, not selfishness? We could use the Uber case (and its undisclosed
settlement and seemingly unending investigations) as one example.

In the coming AI revolution, economies of scale will be drastically altered, hundreds
of thousands of people will be displaced from the workforce, and our very conceptions
of privacy — and apparently safety — will change. All of these implications must be explored in detail before we allow
AI free reign in the real world. AI will redefine our very role in the world just
as the industrial revolution moved society from agrarian (farming), rural communities
of extended families to cities based on mass production and transport, with nuclear
families and working individuals. This time, however, the stakes are higher. When
AI can program itself and truly becomes smarter than we are, who is to say that selfishness
will not rule its decisions?

Dr. Shannon Bowen

Shannon Bowen, Ph.D., researches and teaches PR ethics at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications
at the University of South Carolina.

She is a member of the board of trustees of the Arthur W. Page Society and the board
of directors at the International Public Relations Research Conference.

She writes a regular column for PRWeek, which focuses on PR education, ethics, and
the C-suite.